Lessons from Latvia for Livable Cities: What Is the “Architecture of Our Time” – and PLACE?

As the 63rd International Making Cities Livable convenes in Riga and Jelgava, we will take up this question, applied to some very real case studies – with very real issues for livable cities everywhere

ABOVE: Riga Central Market, considered a notable example of Latvian Republic architecture - although the buildings were created from five Wold War I zeppelin hangars imported from Germany, but fused into a new creative synthesis. (Photo by Guy Percival via PublicDomainPictures.)

RIGA AND JELGAVA, LATVIA - As participants gather here for the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference on July 6-10, a key focus will be on the effects of disruption, displacement and occupation, and the opportunities for regeneration and resilience in their wake.   

In this process, one question naturally arises: what does it mean for architecture to express a local identity – an identity not only of a time, but of a place?

This question is especially relevant in Latvia, where the built environment reflects a remarkable sequence of cultural influences, political transformations, and competing visions of modernity. The history of twentieth-century Latvian architecture offers valuable lessons not only about buildings, but about the relationship between culture, memory, and human flourishing.

Latvia's architecture has never been isolated from the wider world. Situated at the crossroads of Northern and Eastern Europe, the country has absorbed influences from German, Scandinavian, Russian, and broader European traditions. Yet the most distinctive achievements of Latvian architecture emerged not from isolation, but from the creative adaptation of these influences into forms that expressed local culture, climate, materials, and aspirations. In that sense, the history of Latvian architecture is not a story of purity, but of synthesis.

And it is a lesson that has relevance for other parts of the world today.

ABOVE: Some examples of the diversity of architecural styles across Latvian history, from (L-R) Russian Empire, Art Nouveau, Soviet Realism, and Modernism. (Photos by the author, except center left by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra via Wikimedia Commons.)

A History Primer: Latvian Architecture from the Russian Empire to the Present

Beginning in the 1700s, Latvia was annexed into the Russian Empire, and Riga was one of its most prosperous cities. In the late 1800s, rapid economic growth, industrialization, and expanding trade fueled an extraordinary building boom. During this period, Riga became one of the world's great centers of Art Nouveau architecture, a distinction it retains today.

Mikhail Eisenstein (father of the pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein) produced some of the movement's most exuberant and decorative works. In addition, Latvian architects such as Konstantīns Pēkšēns and Eižens Laube helped develop a more distinctly local expression. Their work became associated with the National Romantic movement of the early 20th century, which sought inspiration in Latvian folk traditions, local materials, and regional landscapes.

ABOVE: A building by Konstantīns Pēkšēns and Eižens Laube, designed in 1903, and today the Riga Art Nouveau Center. (Photo by Hans A. Rosbach via Wikimedia Commons.)

The significance of this movement extends beyond its architectural beauty. The National Romantic architects demonstrated that local identity need not reject outside influences. Art Nouveau itself was an international movement, connecting Riga with Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, Glasgow, and St. Petersburg. Yet Latvian architects transformed these influences into something distinctive. They incorporated native motifs, emphasized local materials, and developed forms that resonated with emerging national aspirations.

In many respects, this period established a pattern that would recur throughout Latvian history: the successful adaptation of international ideas into locally meaningful forms.

ABOVE: Examples of Riga's more than 800 Art Nouveau buildings, from a Google Images search.

The First Republic and the Search for a National Architecture

Following independence in 1918, the newly established Latvian Republic faced the challenge of expressing nationhood through its institutions and public buildings. Architecture became one vehicle for that effort.

ABOVE: Christ the King Church in Riga, designed in 1935 by Indriķis Blankenburgs and Kārlis Reisons. (Photo by Simka via Wikimedia Commons.)

The interwar period did not produce a single national style. Instead, Latvian architects explored a range of approaches, from restrained classicism to early but still decorative forms of modernism, including Art Deco. Government buildings, schools, housing projects, and civic institutions reflected a desire to project stability, competence, and cultural confidence.

Importantly, modernization did not necessarily imply the abandonment of tradition. Many buildings combined contemporary construction methods with familiar proportions, materials, and civic forms. Latvian architecture during this period often sought continuity as well as innovation, creating a dialogue between inherited traditions and new social realities.

This balance between continuity and change remains relevant today. The most successful architectural traditions have rarely emerged from either complete rupture or rigid imitation. Rather, they have evolved by adapting inherited knowledge to new circumstances.

One of the most celebrated achievements of the Latvian Republic was the creation of Riga Central Market, opened in 1930 and still regarded as one of Europe's great public markets. The project was remarkable not only for its scale but also for its ingenuity. The market halls were adapted from former German military airship hangar structures, creating an early and highly successful example of adaptive reuse.

Yet the significance of the market extends far beyond the buildings themselves. By concentrating food vendors, farmers, merchants, and customers within a network of indoor halls and adjoining public spaces, the market created a vibrant civic destination and a powerful engine of local economic activity. It strengthened connections between urban residents and regional producers, supported small businesses, encouraged everyday social interaction, and helped establish a distinctive sense of place.

In this respect, Riga Central Market exemplifies a recurring lesson of successful urbanism: the most enduring projects do not merely provide aesthetically distinctive structures, but create the conditions for public life, economic exchange, and community identity to flourish. (The IMCL conference wiill feature an in-depth tour of the market on Tuesday, the 7th of July.)

War, Occupation, and Stalinist Reconstruction

The Second World War brought tragedy, destruction and occupation to Latvia, beginning with Nazi occupation and then Russian reconquest. Jelgava, in particular, suffered catastrophic damage: much of its historic urban fabric was lost, and its reconstruction became one of the major architectural tasks of the postwar period, continuing to this day.

ABOVE: Jelgava in 1945, after catastrophic bombing.

Latvia was annexed into the Soviet Union at the end of the war, and rebuilding proceeded under Soviet political authority. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, architecture throughout the USSR was shaped by the doctrine often known as Socialist Realism or Stalinist Classical architecture. In fact, it was a mandatory style in all Soviet territories between 1946 and 1955.

The Latvian Academy of Science building in Riga, begun in 1951 and finished in 1961. It is characteristic of the Societ Realism style favored by Stalin, sometimes called Stalinist Classicism. (Photo by Nenea Hartia via Wikimedia Commons.)

These buildings featured monumental compositions, symmetrical facades, classical references, and elaborate decorative programs. They were intended to convey permanence, authority, and collective purpose. While deeply associated with an authoritarian political system, they also retained many of the spatial characteristics found in traditional cities: strong street walls, coherent public spaces, visual hierarchy, and richly articulated facades.

As a result, the urban qualities of many Stalinist districts often differed significantly from those that would follow. Whatever their political origins, these environments frequently maintained a degree of human-scaled definition and visual complexity that had characterized cities for centuries.

The 1955 Decree and the Triumph of Standardization

A decisive turning point came in 1955, when the Soviet government issued its famous decree, "On the Elimination of Excesses in Design and Construction." Officially, the decree sought to reduce construction costs, accelerate housing production, and eliminate what were considered unnecessary decorative features. Industrialized building systems, prefabrication, and standardized design became the dominant priorities.

ABOVE: A clear example of the transition from Stalinist Classicism to the International Style, in the Faculty of Forest and Environmental Sciences building at the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (left) and the Faculty of Environment and Civil Engineering building of the same school (right). Although the building on the left was completed in 1957, its design was begun prior to the 1955 Soviet edict, whereas the building on the right was designed in the 1960s and completed in 1972, refpecting the edict's mandates. (Photos by Michael Mehaffy.)

The effects were profound. Across the Soviet Union, apartment blocks, public buildings, and urban districts were designed according to centralized standards and replicated on a vast scale. Architectural ornament was minimized. Local materials and regional characteristics were eliminated in favor of standard materials (often concrete) and uniform characteristics.

In Latvia, these changes carried a significance that went beyond construction economics. The period coincided with Soviet occupation and a broader effort to integrate the republic into a centralized political and cultural system. The highly standardized architecture that followed the 1955 decree became one visible expression of that system.

It's important to note that the architectural ideas that informed this transition did not originate within the Soviet Union, and they were certainly not associated only with Soviet identity. They had emerged earlier in Western Europe through the modernist movement that originated in the 1920s. It was advanced in the Soviet Union and elsewhere by influential figures including Le Corbusier, who advocated for an "International Style" embracing functional efficiency, industrialized construction, standardized building components, and the rejection of historical ornament. The movement became especially popular in the capitalist United States, promoted by influential architects and university professors like Walter Gropius (Harvard) and Mies van der Rohe (Illinois Institute of Technology).

Modernist design was initially controversial in the Soviet Union, where Stalinist architecture had emphasized monumentality and classical symbolism. However, after Stalin's death, Soviet leaders increasingly viewed modernist principles as compatible with their own goals of rapid housing production, industrial efficiency, and technological progress. The 1955 decree effectively aligned Soviet construction policy with many of the same assumptions that were transforming cities throughout Europe and North America — and later, the rest of the world.

It is therefore notable that, despite their origins in very different political systems, both Western and Soviet planners came to embrace remarkably similar architectural formulas: large superblocks, standardized buildings, separation of uses, and the reduction of local architectural variation in favor of an internationally standardized design aesthetic.

The result was not simply modernization. It was also a weakening of architectural differentiation and local identity. Buildings in Riga, Jelgava, Minsk, Kyiv, or Novosibirsk — along with buildings in Chicago, New York and soon the rest of the world — increasingly shared the same architectural vocabulary, regardless of differences in history, culture, climate, or landscape.

ABOVE: Jelgava's traditional wooden buildings (far left) and Riga's distinctive assemblage of stretscape buildings (center left) evoke a strong sense of local identity, whereas the same cannot be said for the International Style mandated by Soviet law after 1955 (center right and far right). (Photo at left by City of Jelgava, others via Wikimedia Commons.)

Today, Latvia has decisively rejected the Soviet political project associated with that era, along with its architecture. Along with the symbolic associations they bring, many of the buildings are poorly insulated, uncomfortable, and energy-inefficient. It is widely recognized that these buildings need to be retrofitted at least, if not demolished and replaced.

This raises an important question: how should these inherited districts evolve in the future? Is it just the symbolism and identity we should consider for new buildings and their aesthetic characteristics — or should we consider other factors too?

What Contemporary Research Is Telling Us

Recent decades have produced a growing body of research that sheds light on this question. Studies in urban design, environmental psychology, public health, and complexity science increasingly suggest that certain recurring characteristics of traditional urban environments support positive human outcomes.

Although the findings are scattered across disciplines, a common theme emerges. Human beings respond positively to environments that provide coherent spatial structure, visual richness, identifiable centers, clear boundaries, and opportunities for social interaction. Features such as articulated facades, visible entrances, rhythmic repetition, transitional spaces, and richly connected public realms are associated with increased walking, stronger social engagement, improved orientation, and greater attachment to place.

Many of these qualities are commonly found in traditional buildings and urban districts—not because earlier architects possessed modern scientific evidence, but because successful forms were refined through long processes of cultural adaptation and practical experience.

This does not mean that every historical building is exemplary, nor that contemporary architecture should simply replicate particular buildings of the past. It does suggest, however, that many traditional patterns embody forms of accumulated knowledge that remain highly relevant and useful today. And it suggests that the taboo of "we mustn't use the forms of the past" is itself out of date, and even inconsistent with contemporary insights from evolutionary science.

Toward an Emerging Latvian Identity for Today

What, then, might a contemporary Latvian architectural identity look like? History suggests that the answer is unlikely to be found in either a universal international style, or a strict reproduction of historical forms. Latvia's most successful architectural periods were neither isolated nor derivative. Rather, they adapted influences from many sources, while transforming them into expressions of local culture and circumstance.

The architects of Riga's Art Nouveau era borrowed from international movements, but they went on to create something distinctly Latvian. The National Romantic movement drew upon folk traditions while participating in broader European currents. Even earlier vernacular traditions reflected centuries of exchange across the Baltic region.

In this sense, local identity is not a fixed artifact waiting to be rediscovered. It is an ongoing cultural process of transfer, revival, adaptation, addition and refinement. It is an evolutionary process.

For cities such as Jelgava, the challenge is not merely to preserve what remains, or to reject what was inherited. It is to continue the work of this adaptation: drawing upon historical knowledge, contemporary research, local traditions, and new technologies to create places that are more humane, more resilient, and more deeply rooted in their communities.

The most successful future architecture for Latvia may well combine elements from many sources — as it has throughout its history. What matters is not where (or when) an idea originated, but how well adapted it has become, and how effectively it contributes to the life of a particular place.

Seen in this light, local identity is not something that can be mandated from above, nor imported wholesale from elsewhere. It emerges from the interaction of culture, memory, environment, and human need. It is also temporal, expressing unique hallmarks of its own time, while also incorporating timeless and universal characteristics. Like a living city itself, it is never finished, but continually renewed, through the creative work of each generation.

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The 63rd International Making Cities Livable will include a workshop to study options for the regeneration of portions of Jelgava, Latvia. Attendees are encouraged to contact the director, Michael Mehaffy, to discuss their participation.

New Science = New + Old Architecture?

The “modern” paradigm in architecture forbids revival of past patterns, and demands rupture and novelty. But that last remaining taboo is a century old now, and showing its failings – and emerging scientific findings point in a very different direction.

A discussion post for the 63rd International Making Cities Livable conference in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. NOTE: A version of this article also ran on the site Common Edge.

In 1998, the critic and theorist Charles Jencks published a short but influential book titled New Science = New Architecture? Its premise was that new developments in complexity science signaled a profound shift in humanity's understanding of the structure of nature. If the scientific picture of reality was changing at a fundamental level, Jencks asked, shouldn't architecture change with it — as it had throughout history?

For Jencks, the answer was clearly yes. The new sciences offered to liberate architecture from the rigid mechanistic logic of earlier modernism, opening the door to a new formal vocabulary of fragmented geometries, dynamic compositions, and daring sculptural novelty. He pointed to works by architects like Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind as exemplars of this emerging paradigm — buildings that embodied, at least in metaphorical form, what he described as a new scientific cosmology.

I think Jencks — whom I regarded as a friend — was right in one sense, and profoundly wrong in another. He was right that the science was genuinely changing, and that architecture could not remain untouched by that transformation. But the new sciences were not merely offering metaphorical fodder for imaginative artistic expression. As Jane Jacobs and others recognized, those sciences carried important implications for the actual organization of human habitat — for how we might promote, or inadvertently harm, human and even planetary well-being.

The problem with Jencks's reading was this: the formal languages he championed as responses to complexity science turned out, in practice, to reproduce many of the same failures they were meant to transcend. The Bilbao Guggenheim is a masterwork of sculptural daring, but it is also a building that offers almost nothing to its surrounding streets. Its titanium surfaces have no relationship to pedestrian scale, and its interior wayfinding is notoriously disorienting. It represents complexity as spectacle rather than complexity as habitat. Simply "complexifying" the formal result — adding metaphorical expressions of dynamism and chaos — did not address the underlying structural poverties of the earlier modernist paradigm. It only relocated them inside a more exciting form of artistic packaging.

That “new paradigm” was not in fact new at all, but merely another guise for the old one.

What is that paradigm? Let me be direct. It is a persistent model from the early 20th century that, above all, conceives of architecture as a project of visual culture, applied to an unquestioned, indeed celebrated, industrial regime. Mechanization will "take command" (Sigfried Giedion), ornament will be a "crime" (Adolf Loos), and new industrial engineering will guide us inexorably "toward a new architecture" (Le Corbusier).

This new architecture was rooted in the era's geometries of relatively primitive industrial production — flat planes, relentless lines, pure volumes — producing what might fairly be described as a “geometrical fundamentalism”: formal impoverishment dressed as moral discipline and artistic valor, and promoted relentlessly through stupendous salesmanship. It combined the excitement of powerful industrial novelties with the drama of bold artistic abstraction and the allure of fine university pedigrees. It was impossible for the old architectures of that day to compete. 

The founders of this paradigm were not without humanistic intentions. The early industrial cities had produced genuine crises of sanitation, overcrowding, and environmental degradation. The architects of that early modernism were responding to real problems with real seriousness. In stripping away the accumulated ornamental excesses of the 19th century, they recovered something valuable: clarity, honesty of structure, attention to light and space. That inheritance deserves acknowledgment.

But their conception of the solution was filled with hubris, and insufficiently attentive to the dynamic and complex characteristics of human nature, and human settlements. Most critically, they confused the individualistic expressions of historical styles — the unique features of a Corinthian capital or a Tudor gable — with the deeper geometric intelligence so often embedded within those traditional environments. In discarding both wholesale, they threw out a treasury of embodied wisdom that, as the new sciences are beginning to demonstrate, are still highly relevant and even essential today.

What was that wisdom? Over centuries, and often through processes that were more unconsciously evolutionary than intentional, human societies developed ways of constructing environments that mediated between public and private space, that created coherent street walls and legible pathways, and that achieved complexity without chaos, variety without fragmentation, and enclosure without monotony. These were not merely aesthetic choices. They were spatial solutions refined through long feedback between cultural norms and lived experience. They were instances of complex adaptive systems at work – in this case, the evolutionary systems of human societies, and cultures of traditional building.

What, more specifically, were these structural capacities? Traditional architectures often embodied a remarkably sophisticated geometric intelligence — one that modern architectural discourse has too often mistaken for mere stylistic convention or ornament. Yet beneath the visible motifs lay recurrent spatial and formal properties that appeared again and again across cultures and centuries: layered scales of detail; coherent hierarchies of spaces and pathways; nested centers and sub-centers; strong edges and thresholds; gradients between public and private realms; local symmetries embedded within larger asymmetries; and richly articulated patterns of repetition and variation.

These environments frequently achieved what might be called “deep symmetry” or “compound symmetry”: not the simplistic mirror symmetry of a rigid classical façade alone, but multiple interacting symmetries distributed across scales, subsystems, and spatial relationships. A medieval square, a Georgian terrace, an Islamic courtyard, or a Japanese street may each contain numerous local symmetries, broken symmetries, rhythmic repetitions, nested proportional relationships, and coherent figure-ground groupings, all interacting dynamically within a larger whole. The result is not monotony, but organized richness — environments that are information-rich without becoming chaotic, and varied without becoming incoherent.

At the same time, these environments typically display what mathematicians and physicists would recognize as forms of recursive or fractal scaling: detail and structure recurring across multiple levels of magnification, from the scale of a window mullion or paving joint to the scale of a street network or skyline composition. Such geometries are not arbitrary embellishments. They provide “structured information fields” that the human perceptual system can efficiently process, navigate, and inhabit.

Equally important are what we might call “legible groups” — coherent clusters of forms, spaces, and pathways, achieved through articulated street walls, layered thresholds, and positive outdoor spaces, that allow humans to orient themselves cognitively and socially within a larger environment.

By contrast, much contemporary architecture and urbanism often display a harsh form of geometrical impoverishment. They typically include large blank surfaces, abrupt scale discontinuities, weakly defined edges, isolated object-buildings, poorly-articulated façades, and disordered spatial fields. While these moves can achieve dramatic visual effects from afar or in photographs, they frequently fail to provide the coherent informational structure required for comfortable human habitation at everyday and close-up scales. In many cases, they actively undermine orientation, attachment, and ease of use.

Increasingly, the implications are understood to extend beyond aesthetic appeal alone (though that is also certainly important). Research in environmental psychology, neuroscience, and cognition suggests that human beings possess evolved responses to particular kinds of spatial and geometric order. Studies by Roger Ulrich, Stephen Kaplan, Yannick Joye, Cleo Valentine, Justin Hollander and others suggest that there are measurable relationships between environmental structure and stress recovery, attention restoration, cognitive mapping, emotional regulation, and social behavior. Researchers are now examining how poorly structured or chronically disorienting environments may contribute to cumulative stress burdens and elevated allostatic loading — the physiological “wear and tear” associated with chronic environmental stressors.

In this light, many traditional architectures begin to appear not as nostalgic stylistic artifacts, but as repositories of accumulated adaptive knowledge: long-evolved experiments in the construction of environments compatible with human perception, cognition, sociability, and well-being. We now see that their enduring appeal arises not merely from sentimentality or historical association, but from deeper correspondences between their geometric structures and the structures of human neurophysiology and social life.

As Jane Jacobs argued, this visual and spatial order is inseparable from the social and economic life of cities. When it is absent, the consequences are not merely aesthetic. Streets empty, retail fails, social interaction retreats, and community attachment attenuates. As Jacobs said in her typically trenchant way, “the method fails.”

Into this void the simulacra rush in, propelled by the relentless logic of constrained real estate markets, consumer manipulation, zoning rules and codes, and all the other interlocking elements of an “operating system for growth” that delivers something few find satisfying or enduring. The architects rightly decry this failure – but the profession too often fails to acknowledge its own complicity. Indeed, it seems more stubborn than ever in maintaining its own privileged but antiquated status quo, updated only with exciting new visuals.

This is not meant simply as an attack, but as an illumination of a corrective path forward. Over the past half-century, the sciences have deepened our understanding of this predicament: game theory shows how players short-circuit the deep feedback cycles of cultural wisdom and degrade the commons of the public realm; the social sciences demonstrate how institutional systems display a rigid form of “lock-in”; and social psychology reveals how artist-architects and their fine-art connoisseurs insert their own “construals” in place of what actual users need and desire.

Preference surveys add a further dimension: they reveal a remarkable consistency in public preferences for the formal qualities most commonly seen in traditional architectures, with remarkable convergence across divisions of ideology, ethnicity, age, sex, and income. The standard professional response — that the public simply lacks the sophistication to appreciate contemporary design — deserves more critical scrutiny than it usually receives.

After all, the public appreciates Bach and Shakespeare, who clearly had no problem serving both highbrow and lowbrow tastes. Perhaps the poverty lies with the artist-architects themselves, who cannot or will not do what so many artists in history have done: serve a broad cross-section of humanity.

More to the point, surely the architecture profession, unlike other fine arts, carries an obligation to serve the needs and desires of those who will actually live within and among their creations. In light of our understanding of impacts on well-being, that amounts to a professional duty of care, not so different from that of any professional in, say, medicine or psychiatry.

But above all, say architects, we must not “copy the past” – never mind its collective intelligence, its embodiment of centuries of refinement and learning, about how to structure successful environments that humans will find beautiful and enduring. Le Corbusier, in particular, was remarkably dogmatic, speaking in his 1943 draft of The Athens Charter:

“Neither the continuation of such [revival] practices nor the introduction of such initiatives will be tolerated in any form. Such methods are contrary to the great lesson of history. Never has a return to the past been recorded, never has man retraced his own steps…”

This would of course come as a surprise to the architects of the Renaissance, or to, say, Thomas Jefferson, who recapitulated the architecture of Palladio, who had also recapitulated the architecture of Vitruvius, who had also recapitulated the architecture of the Greeks… and so on and so on. To them we could add the fusion of the Arts and Crafts, or the eclecticism of the Vienna Secession, or countless other examples.

Indeed, revival has been a constant in the history of architecture – at least up to about 1930 – forming a kind of fugue of patterns and motifs, weaving in and out of history, building and enriching human habitat.  The result has been nothing other than some of the most successful, well-loved and enduring architecture of human history. 

But apparently, we must never, ever, build anything like it again.

And instead, we have the world we have: one that is industrialized, ugly, and full of discordant works of gigantic sculpture, or else sprawling monocultures of tract houses and big-box arterials. It is also a world that is increasingly unwalkable, unfriendly to pedestrians, unfriendly to ecosystems – in spite of abundant greenwashing gestures – and on the whole, astonishingly resource-inefficient. It is a world that looks increasingly to be, in a word, unsustainable.

So we see that these issues are intimately connected: ugliness and discomfort on the one hand, and unsustainability on the other.

This issue matters urgently now, because the world has entered a new urban epoch of breathtakingly rapid urbanization, and one that is accompanied by converging crises of climate disruption, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and geopolitical instability. Our settlements – the structures we build, and the ways those structures impact the natural world, and the world of human nature – have always had a profound impact on human well-being, and never more so than today. This new era demands more than exciting new metaphorical expressions. It demands useful applications of scientific insight to the growing challenges facing human settlements, and human civilization.

To be fair to the profession: many architects do earnestly seek to address issues of energy use, environmental impact, climate adaptation, and human well-being. Passive House designers, biophilic architects, and practitioners of community-centered design have made genuine contributions. These efforts are real and should not be dismissed. The question is whether they are adequate to the scale of the challenge — or whether they remain, however sincerely intended, too-modest adjustments to an amnesiac paradigm, whose underlying assumptions are themselves the problem.

Here is where the scientific evidence points toward a remedy. If we can demonstrate that certain spatial configurations reliably support cognitive restoration, social interaction, physical health, community attachment, and more ecologically benign lifestyles — and that others reliably undermine these outcomes — then the choice of formal language is no longer purely a matter of artistic liberty. It becomes, at least in part, a professional and ethical responsibility.

This does not mean that science dictates a single design language, and certainly not a particular historicist style. It means that designs must be evaluated against a richer set of criteria than formal novelty — and that formal novelty, as a value in itself, must have no privileged claim on our priorities.

Here also is where the work of Christopher Alexander, Nikos Salingaros, and related thinkers — mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and in addition, environmental designers — becomes relevant in ways that the profession has too often ignored or dismissed. Their project was and is much deeper than a simple nostalgic revivalism. It is, rather, an attempt to recover and articulate the recurrent geometries and generative logics underlying successful historical environments, and to develop effective methods by which such logics might be re-applied under contemporary conditions.

Alexander’s well-known “15 Properties” represent one of the most systematic attempts to identify these recurring structural characteristics: strong centers, levels of scale, alternating repetition, boundaries, local symmetries, gradients, positive space, roughness, and other interrelated properties that frequently appear in environments humans experience as coherent, life-giving, and enduring. Importantly, these are not stylistic prescriptions but relational geometries — patterns of organized complexity that can manifest across many cultures, materials, technologies, and historical periods.

And we can reuse this generative information freely, without having to reinvent from scratch. This is precisely the value of Alexander’s “pattern language” approach – to capture the genetic material from past structures, without literal copying. Instead, the approach aims to build on the infinite extensibility (and creative possibility) of language itself. The further development of pattern languages and their additional capacities — as shown in software, wiki, Agile and other fields — offers tantalizing promise today.

These questions bear directly on one of the most ambitious policy commitments of our time. The New Urban Agenda, adopted by acclamation by all 193 member states of the United Nations, commits the global community to cities that are inclusive, resilient, safe, sustainable, and socially connected. These are not goals that can be achieved independently of urban form. Streets and public spaces that repel rather than invite, buildings that fragment rather than reinforce coherence, environments that fail to generate attachment and care — these actively undermine the human outcomes the agenda seeks to advance.

On the other hand, the collective intelligence embodied in centuries of adaptive evolution and refinement offers us something irreplaceably precious: a kind of “repository” of genetic information that is still useful today, not merely in its symbolic associations, but in its deeper structural capacities. The properties of fractal scaling, of multiple forms of symmetry, of symmetry-breaking and complex order, are on exhibit in traditional architectures throughout history. They offer us a grand kind of library from which to read and study its lessons.   

The task before architects today is therefore not to revive stylistic precedents for their own sake — although we should note that this is not in itself a problem, but it does not take us far enough. The overriding need is to recover and extend the geometric intelligence that allows environments to function as coherent, adaptive, life-supporting systems. That means they must be enriched by, and not displaced by, a life-enriching form of architectural art, supported by a full complement of enriching geometric responses.

To be sure, in this work there is still an essential place for creative expression and dynamism — but the new must be rooted (as it always was) in the reality of nature, culture, and history. In the end, architecture is not merely gigantic sculpture: it is, first and foremost, human habitat, whose impact on daily life is continuous and profound. As Jane Jacobs urged, we need art in cities — but it is an art that has a kind of job to do: to enrich the meanings of city life, and not to subjugate or displace them in favor of the artist’s private expressive predilections. The practitioners of architectural science and art have a professional responsibility to learn from and to apply the accumulated knowledge of tradition, just as do the scientists and practitioners of medicine, and other fields that profoundly affect human well-being.

In that light, the prohibition against architectural recapitulation and revival — against the regeneration of inherited forms of spatial intelligence — may prove to be one of the great cultural blind spots of our era. If so, the genuine avant-garde task before us is not to create ever more extravagant neoplasms, nor to create simulacra of other eras. It is to recover, extend, and reanimate the living patterns that have long sustained human civilization.

A few of the many contemporary examples of the "new-old" architecture:

Christopher Alexander, Central Hall, Eishin School, Tokyo, Japan (1985). Photo by Center for Environmental Structure.

Christopher Alexander, The Linz Cafe, exhibition building in Linz, Austria (1980). Photo from the book The Linz Cafe by Christopher Alexander.

Hassan Fathy, Dar al Islam Retreat Center, Abiquiu, New Mexico (1982). Photo by the author.

Hassan Fathy, interior of Dar al Islam Retreat Center, Abiquiu, New Mexico (1982). Photo by the author.

Michael Mehaffy, experimental low-cost construction house, Texas Hill Country (1982). Photo by the author.

Houses by Michael G. Imber (left) and Sara Bega (right) at Las Catalinas, Costa Rica, in an urban plan by Douglas Duany and TSW (2011). Photo by Douglas Duany.

ONE MONTH To Historic 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) Conference in Beautiful Latvia

Preparations are in place for a content-rich gathering, featuring study tours, receptions, workshops and much more; livable city topics include affordability, walkability, economic opportunity, resilience, artificial intelligence in design, and many more timely issues for cities and towns.

ABOVE: Left and center, IMCL Board Members Jim Brainard and Michael Mehaffy meeting recently with staff at Riga's very beautiful House of the Blackheads, where the opening reception will be held; Above right, making a video about the splendid Jelgava Palace, where the main conference sessions will be held; second row, left, meeting with Riga City Architect Peteris Ratas (center) and Riga Mayor Viesturs Kleinbergs; center, meeting with Jelgava Mayor Mārtiņš Daģis, staff, and officials of the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (our hosts and partners); and right, meeting with guides who will provide several study tours on Monday and Tuesday, July 6th and 7th.

RIGA AND JELGAVA - With just one month to go, preparations for the 63rd IMCL conference are nearly complete. Attendees will be treated to a rich program of events:

• Welcome session by the City of Riga;

• Study tour of the city core;

• Study tour of the turn-of-century and Art Nouveau areas;

• Opening reception at the splendid House of the Blackheads, including a tour of the historic building and its centuries of history;

• Study tour of the amazing Riga Central Market — Europe's largest — with over 3,000 stalls in 780,000 square feet of converted zeppelin hangars;

• Transport to and study tour of the city of Jelgava, including its historic Old Town Street Quarter of distinctive wooden buildings, and its Soviet-era buildings that are slated for regeneration;

• Welcome reception at the historic Jelgava Palace, our venue for the regular sessions of the conference;

• Three days of plenaries, breakouts, and workshops, including a workshop on AI in design, a drawing workshop, and a workshop on the regeneration of a portion of Jelgava;

• An optional awards dinner at the Jelgava History and Art Museum;

• A final plenary with discussion and debate, followed by a closing reception at Jelgava Palace;

• Abundant opportunities for side tours, cultural events, and other immersive experiences.

ABOVE: Some of the delights, and the urban lessons, of Riga.

The conference comes at an especially challenging moment for cities around the world. Under the theme “Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption,” the conference will bring together urban leaders, architects, planners, scholars, developers, public officials, and NGO representatives to examine how cities can respond positively to a period marked by environmental stress, geopolitical instability, economic uncertainty, technological disruption, and social fragmentation.

This is certainly not the first time in history that cities have been under stress — and the study of that history, in places like Latvia, offers us many useful lessons today. Among them is how to use a time of disruption to build better, and to recover city quality of life, ecology, opportunity, durability, sustainability — and livability for all.

ABOVE: Some of the sights of Jelgava, including the Jelgava Palace, the Holy Trinity Church Tower with the distinctive restaurant 8 stavs, and the distinctive wooden houses of the historic Old Town Street Quarter.

Participants will experience two complementary urban settings: Riga, one of Europe's great historic capitals and a UNESCO-recognized center of architectural heritage, and Jelgava, a city that has undergone extensive post-war reconstruction and continues to grapple with questions of regeneration, identity, and resilience.

The conference theme reflects a growing recognition that cities must move beyond merely "sustaining" existing systems, and toward actively regenerative approaches that rebuild ecological health, social capital, economic vitality, and cultural continuity. A central question is how communities can adapt to rapid change without sacrificing local identity, heritage, and human-scale urban qualities. Latvia offers an especially compelling setting for these discussions: situated at the crossroads of major historical and contemporary geopolitical forces, the country has repeatedly confronted disruption, occupation, destruction, and renewal. The resulting urban landscape provides valuable lessons about recovery, adaptation, and the enduring importance of place-based culture.

A distinctive feature of the Riga–Jelgava conference will be its emphasis on learning directly from real places. Participants will engage with historic districts, public spaces, regeneration projects, and urban neighborhoods through a number of guided tours and workshops, examining how urban form, architecture, public life, and governance interact to create resilience. Rather than focusing solely on abstract theory, the conference seeks to connect research with practical implementation, exploring how successful patterns and strategies can be applied in cities and towns facing similar challenges worldwide.

The conference is also notable for its broad international and interdisciplinary participation. IMCL has long served as a forum where practitioners and scholars from multiple fields can engage directly with one another, bridging gaps between research, policy, design, development, and civic leadership. Partners and participants are expected from organizations including UN-Habitat, the King's Foundation, the Congress for the New Urbanism, INTBAU, universities, municipalities, and numerous civic organizations, including those from Latvia. This diversity of perspectives is especially valuable at a time when many urban challenges—housing affordability, climate adaptation, social cohesion, economic resilience, and heritage conservation—cannot be solved within professional silos. We need a "joined-up" approach.

For prospective attendees, the conference offers a unique opportunity for professional and personal development — not only to learn about emerging approaches to regenerative urbanism, but also to build professional relationships and collaborations across continents. In an era when urban professionals are searching for practical strategies that can bridge the gap between aspiration and implementation, the IMCL conferences provide both intellectual inspiration and actionable knowledge. The setting of Latvia—combining a rich architectural heritage, a history of resilience, and an active process of contemporary urban transformation—makes it an especially fitting place to explore how cities can recover from disruption, while building stronger, more beautiful, more durable cities, towns, and countrysides.

For more information, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

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